I’m particularly interested in the lack of distinction drawn between the library, the museum, and the archive in Manoff’s overview of the field – and the way in which the conflation of the museum and archive in particular heightens and crystallizes the issues of power and control that are the concerns of most of our readings today. As soon as the Elgin Marbles were mentioned, I began thinking about the British Museum and the British Library (which I group together because the latter was constructed from the collections of the former, in what their latest development plan calls a “courageous post-war vision.”)

Mbembe notes the imaginary function of “the rights of collective ownership” (21) that the archive makes us feel we possess; and in fact most archives seem to be collected and kept with the idea in mind that someone will have access to them: “the alchemy of the archive: it is supposed to belong to everyone.” (21) Who these someones may be varies pretty widely, of course, from archive to archive, but I’m particularly interested in the archives which claim some level of public access (the British Library, for example, but I could just as easily jump off of Catherine’s post to talk about NARA’s presidential libraries, or talk about the rare books archives at the Boston Public Library.)

The holdings of these institutions are all available to the public – although here I’m reminded of when Simon Armitage went to the British Library in the course of translating Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and was turned away when he asked for the manuscript (“the lady on the desk seems torn between taking me seriously and sliding her hand towards the panic button.”) Nevertheless, there is at least a theoretical claim to public access at all of these places. The reality, though, is that a good portion of the 1.6 million yearly visitors to the British Library probably don’t pull a single piece from the collection – instead, they interact with it as a museum, a set of exhibitions that have already been curated and presented.

One of the functions this has is to foreground the issue of curation: seeing particular objects plucked from their larger archival context to be presented and arranged reminds us, ideally, of the invisible work (and the invisible biases) behind archival in general: that “archives are not neutral or innocent” (Manoff 14). If constructing the archive is an exercise of power, then presenting and displaying some of its most valuable objects is a trumpeting of that power: the galleries in the British Library are overwhelming, I’d argue intentionally so, with the Magna Carta, the Lindisfarne Gospels, and the sole surviving manuscript of Beowulf, among other objects, on essentially permanent display in a few gallery rooms. The sense of time and geographical space covered in the arrangement of these particular objects is almost dizzying – it has the sweep of empire, a thousand years of English identity and a presence that acquires information and objects from across the world. (This is, assumably, meant to be impressive in a more positive light than many postcolonial scholars might view it, and of course the word acquires in my last sentence has a bit too much delicacy.)

I think a lot of what I’m getting at is an interest in the museum – or I should more properly say the museum exhibition — as something that heightens and almost dramatizes the features, functions, and concerns that can be applied to the larger archive which lurks behind it.